Faculty News

New Faculty 2021

John A. Schwendel joined the department in fall 2021 as a lecturer. His primary responsibilities will be teaching our business-track introductory classes. Professor Schwendel received his bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He completed his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2020. He has researched historical income inequality, methodologies for fitting distributions to data, and the implications of heavy-tailed distributions in health policy issues. Professor Schwendel’s research also explores the effects of the changing nature of the retirement decision on income distribution. He has taught courses including Principles of Economics, Introductory Microeconomics, Intermediate Microeconomics, and the Economics of Personal Finance.

John Schwendel
John A. Schwendel

Faculty Promotions

Paul Graf has been promoted to the new highest-level non-tenure position of Teaching Professor. His primary duties during an academic year are to teach four large sections (250-410 students) of Economics B251 (Fundamentals of Economics for Business I) and Economics B252 (Fundamentals of Economics for Business II). He was an active member of the committee revising the curricula and organization of these two new introductory economics courses designed for business majors in 2019. He also teaches the required graduate course Economics E502 (Teaching Undergraduate Economics) for our first-year Ph.D. students and conducts Teaching Academy for more senior Ph.D. students which provides mentoring in their teaching activities. He also teaches an online version of B251 or B252 in the summer and is the department's noted expert in online education.

Ruli Xiao has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Her research focuses on both empirical industrial organization and micro-econometrics and its applications. Professor Xiao's recent papers investigate the nonparametric identification and estimation of finite action games with multiple equilibria and/or unobserved market-level heterogeneity. She was born in China and received her B.S. in Statistics from Tongjing University, M.A. in Economics from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University in 2014.

Ke-Li Xu has been promoted to full professor. Dr. Xu's research focuses on econometrics, developing statistical methodologies and theory to analyze economic models and data. He has written and published on various topics, including (more recently) discontinuity-based quasi-experimental designs, predictive regression, monetary policy, non-parametric and semi-parametric models of volatility and risk, and (earlier) structure change, continuous-time diffusions, quantile regression, trends and cointegration. The main theme of his research is to design statistical estimation and inference methods for economic models that accommodate features like endogeneity, nonlinearity, heterogeneity and persistency, without imposing strong constraints on the data generating process.

 

Faculty Honors

Ala Avoyan and Ahmad Lashkaripour each received a 2021 Trustees Teaching Award for outstanding teaching. This award honors faculty who have had a positive impact on student learning, especially undergraduates.

Yoosoon Chang will receive the 2021 Maekyung-KAEA Economist Award for her outstanding professional achievement. The award ceremony will be held during a virtual business meeting of the KAEA where she will share her research. KAEA is the Korea-America Economic Association.

Yoosoon was also recently elected a Fellow of the International Association for Applied Econometrics (IAAE), ( https://appliedeconometrics.org ). Read about Professor Chang's achievements and research interests at this link: https://economics.indiana.edu/about/faculty/chang-yoosoon.html 

 

Faculty News and Accomplishments

Joshua Bernstein co-authored with Alexander Richter (IU Econ Ph.D. 2012) and Nathaniel Throckmorton (IU Econ Ph.D. 2014), "Cyclical Net Entry and Exit," in European Economic Review, 136, (July 2021).

Mostafa Beshkar co-authored "Dispute Settlement with Second-Order Uncertainty," which has been accepted for publication in  International Economic Review.

Michael Kaganovich jointly with Sinan Sarpca and Xuejuan Su (IU Econ Ph.D. 2004), wrote "Competition in Higher Education" forthcoming in Routledge Handbook of the Economics of Education, 2021, in press.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-the-Economics-of-Education/McCall/p/book/9780367194581 

Laura Liu co-authored "Panel Forecasts of Country-Level Covid-19 Infections," which was published in the Journal of Econometrics, 220(1), (January 2021), 2-22.

Dean Lueck organized and hosted the 3rd Symposium on Natural Resource Governance for Young Scholars in May. This was a hybrid symposium with 10 junior scholars presenting their work and 5 senior scholars serving as mentors. (Read the article about this symposium in the Around the {Department} section of the newsletter.) More information can be found here:

https://economics.indiana.edu/news-events/young-scholars-symposium/index.html 

Volodymyr Lugovskyy co-authored "What is the impact of introducing a parallel OTC market? Theory and evidence from the Chinese interbank FX market" in the Journal of Financial Economics, 140(1), (April 2021), 270-291. His co-authors were Craig Holden (deceased, April 3, 2021, Finance Department, IU Kelley School of Business), Dong Lu (IU Econ Ph.D. 2017), and Daniela Puzzello (IU Econ faculty member).

Christian Matthes co-authored "Understanding the Size of the Government Spending Multiplier: It's in the Sign," Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming, ( https://cm1518.github.io/files/OnlineAppFP.pdf ); "How to Go Viral: A COVID-19 Model with Endogenously Time-Varying Parameters," Journal of Econometrics, forthcoming; "Forecasting the COVID-19 epidemic: the case of New Zealand," New Zealand Economic Papers,forthcoming; "A composite likelihood approach for dynamic structural models," The Economic Journal , 131(638), (August 2021), 2447–2477; and "Dealing With Misspecification in Structural Macroeconometric Models," Quantitative Economics, 12(2), (May 2021), 313-350, (lead article).

James Walker co-authored "Experimental evidence on sharing rules and additionality in transfer payments," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 188, (August 2021), 1221-1247. Professor Walker also co-authored "Incentivizing Provision of Collective Goods: Allocation Rules," Southern Economic Journal, 87(4), (April 2021), 1345-1365. Brock Stoddard (IU Econ Ph.D. 2013) was one of the co-authors of this article.

Todd Walker co-authored "Confounding dynamics," in the Journal of Economic Theory, 196, (September 2021).

Stefan Weiergraeber authored "Network Effects and Switching Costs in the US Wireless Industry," in International Economic Review, forthcoming.

Ke-Li Xu authored "Testing for Multiple-Horizon Predictability: Direct Regression Based versus Implication Based," The Review of Financial Studies, 33(9), (September 2020), 4403-4443 and "Inference of Local Regression in the Presence of Nuisance Parameters," Journal of Econometrics, 218(2), (October 2020), 532-560. Professor Xu also works as a Panelist of the Economics Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF).